Not only are the hit songs, stars, and soap operas cyclically recurrent and rigidly invariable types, but the specific content of the entertainment itself is derived from them and only appears to change. The details are interchangeable.
Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944)
The goal is a society in which the basic social unit is you and your television set. If the kid next door is hungry, it's not your problem. If the retired couple next door invested their assets badly and are now starving, that's not your problem either.
The Common Good (1998)
The decline in American pride, patriotism, and piety can be directly attributed to the extensive reading of so-called 'science fiction' by our young people. This poisonous rot about creatures not of God's making, societies of 'aliens' without a good Christian among them, and raw sex between unhuman beings with three heads and God alone knows what sort of reproductive apparatus keeps our young people from realizing the true will of God.
"Can Our Young People Find God in the Pages of Trashy Magazines? No, Of Course Not!" Reader's Digest, Aug. 1985: p142-157.
The judges of normality are present everywhere. We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator- judge, the “social worker”-judge.
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, (1975).
Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.
Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena.
I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.
Newsweek October 14, 1985. Quoted from: Simpson's Contemporary Quotations, 1988.
This site serves as an archive of quotations dealing with religion and philosophy. Specific topics covered include, but are not limited to: God, faith, reason, skepticism, atheism, agnosticism, fundamentalism, extremism. The quotes are chosen on the basis of my finding them interesting - regardless of whether I agree with them or not. This is by no means an exhaustive collection, although it does grow as I add quotes regularly.
Suggestions? Feel free to email me with quotations you think could be added. I can't guarantee that I will respond to each message and, please, be sure to include a full citation with each quote. There are a lot of sites out there that have many quotes without citations, thus preventing readers from being able to trace the authorship. I have very few of those and don't want any more, if I can help it.
Copyright © 2003 - 2004 by Austin Reed Cline